56 Onomasiology Online 5 (2004): 56-139 MARION MATSCHI COLOR TERMS IN ENGLISH: ONOMASIOLOGICAL AND SEMASIOLOGICAL ASPECTS Abstract The following article is a master’s thesis on color terms in English language history. Within Berlin and Kay’s eleven basic color categories, and various non-basic, secondary, or specialized expressions are analyzed regard- ing their origin and underlying motives of formation: Inherited terms are described from an onomasiological point of view, thus starting from the respective concept or image, whereas loanwords are dealt with separately as their motivations are often unclear to the speaker. As the color systems of Old and Modern English are encoded differently, it is investigated how transitional stages and nuances of color are represented in the re- spective periods. Finally, interesting semasiological aspects are given as well. The study shows that, resulting from a huge need of new color names due to economical and cultural changes, many color terms were borrowed from French and Latin, but even more are a product of metonymical exten- sions of entity senses. By means of this, all kinds of images and concepts (e.g. plants, animals, food etc.) can be utilized to designate color. However, they are often restricted, remain unknown to the layperson, and can disappear very quickly (e.g. fashion and car color terms). ABBREVIATIONS1 AN Anglo-Norman BCT Basic Color Term Da Danish Du Dutch EDD The English Dialect Dictionary F French FEW Französisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch G German Gmc Germanic Goth Gothic IE Indo-European IEW Indogermanisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch It Italian L Latin Lith Lithuanian LL Late Latin ME Middle English MED Middle English Dictionary MIr Medieval Irish ML Medieval Latin ModE Modern English ODEE The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology OE Old English OEC Dictionary of Old English Corpus OED The Oxford English Dictionary OF Old French OFris Old Frisian OHG Old High German OI Old Icelandic OIr OldIrish 1For full bibliographic details of published titles, see the Bibliography. 57 ON Old Norse ONhb Old Northumbrian OS Old Saxon Pg Portuguese Skr Sanskrit SED Survey of English Dialects Sp Spanish Sw Swedish TOE A Thesaurus of Old English 1. Preliminary Remarks 1.1 Color Terms "Begriffe für Farbnamen, Schattierungen und Kontraste von Farben sind ein wichtiger Bestandteil im Grundwortschatz jeder Sprache. Mit anderen Worten gehören Farbbeze- ichnungen zu den allgemeinen Eigenschaften und Merkmalen (= Universalien) von natürlichen Sprachen, da Farben zu den wichtigsten Informationsträgern für den Men- schen zählen."2 The world we live in is a world of color. Everything our eyes can perceive, the environment we are confronted with and surrounded by, the diversity of objects, be it natural or man- made, and even human beings themselves are more or less marked by the appearance of color. The human eye is assumed to be so sensitive that it can distinguish between up to ten million different nuances (Methuen 31978: 7, Hope/Walch 1990: 286). However, most English people go through life with a basic color vocabulary of just eleven words. As Wyler (1992: 91) points out, the general tendency to subsume and classify color in everyday speech with a small, readily available set of terms (cf. Gipper’s "sprachliche Farbordnung" (1955: 138)) may be due to the usefulness of basic terms which cover a wide area of shades, the fact that speakers do not require a finer distinction of shades, tints, and tones to identify objects or to form comprehensible oppositions, and, finally, that in people’s early education colors are "learned" in such a way that a few names help children to recognize and name objects in their colorful surrounding. "The purpose of a colour name is to communicate the appearance of a given colour or to enable us to ’think in colour’. Thus the colour name must be so characteristic of the colour’s appearance that it is readily understood by others. Since our environment is the source of colours, it is here that we must look for objects of typical colours, objects for which we already have names and which can be used to designate a characteristic appearance."3 Aside from the best illustration of a color sensation, additional factors such as the transfer of connotations and emotions are often important as well. Much of the color vocabulary of a particular language is to a considerable degree the product of culture (McNeill 1972: 24, Lyons 1999: 55). Not only does the mother tongue determine how we see, observe, notice, and classify colors, but also the state of technology, industry, and economic growth influences the size of a color system as well as its function in practical life. As the nomenclature of color is extremely rich, particularly in the domain of art and fashion, the field is a remarkably complex one, featuring components which belong to poetic 2Welsch/Liebmann 2003: 13. 3Methuen 31978: 138. 58 diction, the jargon of dyers, painters, or interior decorators, various kinds of contextual and collocational restrictions, and, furthermore, symbolic associations. But additionally, people’s knowledge of, and interest in, color and color terms can vary enormously (e.g. depending on the culture they live in, their education, profession, experience, conventions, the availability of materials etc.) as well as the way in which they structure the field. The fact, however, that the number of readily available color terms is generally rather small and simple does not make color simple to understand. The best examples, or foci, of color concepts mostly are clear, whereas their boundaries or transitional stages between two concepts are indefinite and fuzzy. Color is a physical, psychological, and linguistic phenomenon, which, moreover, has to be observed from a diachronic perspective, since the color system can change over the centuries. Color terms are therefore impossible to investigate without reference to many other spheres such as colorimetry, anthropology, philosophy, psychology, semiotics, literary criticism, etymology, ethnology, art history, physics, chemistry, and cognitive science.4 1.2 History of the Study of Color Terms The study of color terms is an old and exciting field in which several academic disciplines overlap. In the 20th century the prevailing view in anthropology, linguistics, and psycholin- guistics with regard to the subject of color terminology changed from an originally evolu- tionary perception (following Gladstone and Geiger), through a relativistic view based on the Saphir-Whorf theory, back to an evolutionary and culturally universal perspective provided by Berlin and Kay’s Basic Color Terms (1969). The latter view color categories as orga- nized around best examples (i.e. foci) by means of which people classify the color space.5 Although their theory has been intensively debated, revised, and refined several times in the 4It is of course not easy to distinguish between the linguistic, physical, and psychological factors when speak- ing of primary and secondary (and tertiary) colors. A more useful differentiation that is made is between chromatic, thus spectral colors (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet), non-chromatic colors (brown, magenta, pink), and achromatic colors (black, gray, white). A further distinction within the chro- matic set of colors is that, typically, red, orange, and yellow are considered ’warm’ colors and blue, green, and, to a lesser extent, violet are the ’cold’ colors. The former are more salient, stand out better and will, furthermore, appear to be larger if they are in a shape of the same size (Sahlins 1976: 5). Moreover, all colors have three distinct, fundamental parameters that account for their appearance: hue, value, and satu- ration. Hue is the aspect of color we refer to by the name (e.g. red), value signifies the admixture of white and black with a hue, thus its relative lightness or darkness (e.g. dark, pale), and saturation refers to the admixture of gray with a hue, thus its relative purity (e.g. vivid, dull). Possible differences in these parts are so numerous that they could not all be named separately. However, scientific knowledge of chromatology and wave lengths as well as color circles and color charts may be helpful in the investigation of the meaning of a color term, but they cannot automatically show its meaning (cf. Wierzbicka 1990). 5Four major criteria should ideally suffice to characterize a basic color term (BCT): 1) it is monolexemic, 2) its signification is not included in that of any other term (as that of scarlet is included in the meaning of red), 3) its application is not restricted to a narrow class of objects (as with blond), 4) must be "psy- chologically salient" for speakers - which would imply, for instance, that it tends to occur at the beginning of lists of elicited terms, occurs in the ideolect of all informants, and enjoys stability of reference and of use (Berlin/Kay 1969: 6). In doubtful cases the authors avoid recent foreign loans, names of objects, mor- phologically complex items, and terms with distributions similar to already established basic color terms (e.g. derivations in -ish). They found up to eleven basic color categories, white, black, red, yellow, green, blue, brown, grey, purple, pink, orange, of which they hypothesized that they evolve in more or less the same order in all languages, thus feature the same chronological and evolutionary sequence (p. 4), as it is conditioned by neurophysiological factors. The sequence ranges from Stage I languages which have only